Oh What a Paradise It Seems

From one of the most renowned twentieth-century American writers, this “luminous ephiphany of life ... [is] a charming fable of old age, nostalgia, and loss” ( The Washington Post Book World ). Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Cheever's final novel is a fable set in a village so idyllic it has no fast-food outlet and having as its protagonist an old man, Lemuel Sears, who still has it in him to fall wildly in love with strangers of both sexes. But Sears's paradise is threatened; the pond he lo